It is by now well-known that carboxylic acylating agents produced by polyalkylene reactions with carboxylic-containing compounds when further reacted with (a) an amine having at least one H--N&lt; group; (b) an alcohol; (c) reactive metal or reactive metal compound and (d) a combination of any two or more of (a)-(c), the components of (d) being reacted simultaneously or sequentially produce compositions having dispersing, fluidity or detergency properties or combinations thereof depending on the nature of the composition. In depth discussion of these compositions, their properties and modes of preparation and post treatments are discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,234,435; 5,041,622; and 5,230,714 which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety, including references cited therein, for disclosure and examples and enablement related to this invention.
In the patents mentioned herein-above and references given therein, disclosure is made of reacting polyalkylenes with carboxylic-containing groups in the presence of chlorine to obtain substituted acylating agents. For such reactions conducted in the presence of bromine and/or chlorine, halogen is incorporated into the substituted acylating agent. A method of producing a chlorine free substituted acylating agent is to use a high vinylidene polyalkylene to react with maleic anhydride under thermal conditions without chlorine. High vinylidene polybutylenes and substituted acylating agents derived therefrom are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,152,499; 4,605,808; and 5,071,919 which are herein incorporated by reference. However, high vinylidene polyalkylenes are more expensive than polyalkylene such as polyisobutylene derived from acid catalyzed polymerization of a C.sub.4 -raffinate of a cat cracker or ethylene plant butane/butene stream, so there is a continued interest in using a chlorine-containing process to react polyalkylenes with maleic anhydrides to form polyalkylene substituted acylating compositions.